The Father Factor

What are the primary challenges of fathers who participate in responsible fatherhood programs? The Fatherhood Research and Practice Network (FRPN) recently released a brief that attempts to answer that question. (I sit on the FRPN's advisory committee.) Answering that question is critical because these challenges may be, as the brief notes, strongly associated with lower levels of father involvement in children's lives and lower quality coparenting relationships.

The top 5 challenges they mentioned in descending order of frequency were:

Unemployment

Lack of money to buy things for their children

Inability to pay child support

Difficulty keeping a job

Inability to pay bills

The other challenges they mentioned were wide-ranging, from physical health problems to their living situation preventing their children from coming to see them to drug/alcohol use to being accused of abusing/neglecting their children. (The brief includes all of the challenges the fathers mentioned, the frequency with which fathers mentioned them, and the severity of those challenges.)

These challenges underscore one of the most vital pieces of guidance National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) has provided to organizations through the years: the importance of helping fathers meet their most immediate, pressing needs as part of or even before enrolling them in a responsible fatherhood program. Meeting these needs is often the hook that encourages fathers to enroll in a responsible fatherhood program and to maintain their participation rather than learning how to be a better father and parent (e.g. through increased knowledge of child development, child discipline, etc.). Indeed, helping fathers overcome these challenges should be a component of a responsible fatherhood program either through the provision of services (often called "wrap-around services") by the organization running the program or the organization's partners.

The FRPN's findings are similar to the results of research that I conducted with Dr. Keith Cherry, a long-time colleague and friend, when NFI was part of the National Quality Improvement Center on Non-Resident Fathers and the Child Welfare System (QIC-NRF), a 5-year project (2006-2011) funded by the Children's Bureau in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services through a contract with the American Humane Association. That research involved interviews with low-income, non-resident fathers involved in the child welfare system in four communities supplemented by interviews with fatherhood program practitioners who worked with these and other child-welfare involved fathers.

Like the fathers interviewed by the FRPN researchers, the fathers Keith and I interviewed also mentioned financial challenges as their most pressing needs. Our research (published in the journal Protecting Children) also involved delving deeper into the impact of these fathers' challenges on the fathers and their perceptions so that child welfare workers and fatherhood practitioners within and who work with the child welfare system could better understand these fathers and, as a result, work more effectively with them and develop better strategies to encourage enrollment in fatherhood programs offered by child welfare agencies.

We recorded, transcribed, and conducted an in-depth content analysis of the interviews. We identified the following themes in the lives of these fathers:

The financial and emotional devastation caused by their own absence from their children's lives.

The belief that they are constantly extorted by the mother of their children with their children being bargaining chips in a constant tug-of-war between them and the mother in which the mother has the upper hand.

The loss of control over their lives and hopelessness about the future.

The belief that the judicial/court system fosters poor fatherhood.

This deep understanding of these fathers' lives is so critical to effective program delivery. Staff of responsible fatherhood programs must look not only at fathers' needs but how those needs affect fathers. It is those affects that drive fathers' behavior. Indeed, the most successful of the programs we studied during our participation in the QIC-NRF were those seen by fathers to meet fathers' needs and care about fathers' welfare.

What are you doing to understand and solve the most pressing problems of fathers?

What are you doing to better understand the impact of father absence on the fathers you serve?

National Fatherhood Initiative and The Moms partner for a special New York City screening of Columbia Pictures' upcoming film Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 with Paul Blart himself, Kevin James, on Monday, April 13th. The film releases in theaters nationwide Friday, April 17th, but don't miss out on the chance to see the new movie before anyone.

After six years of keeping our malls safe, Paul Blart has earned a well-deserved vacation, or has he? Sony's Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 arrives in theaters Friday, April 17th. Vegas may have a new high roller, but not before that high roller visits NYC!

After the screening, please stay for a Q&A with Kevin James and the film's director, Andy Fickman (also an NFI Fatherhood Award recipient for Parental Guidance, the 2012 Fatherhood Movie of the Year), followed by a special presentation of the NFI Fatherhood Award to Kevin James.

After six years of keeping our malls safe, Paul Blart has earned a well-deserved vacation, or has he? In this sequel, Paul Blart heads to Vegas for the annual Security Guard Expo with his teenage daughter Maya (Raini Rodriguez) before she leaves for college. While at the convention, he inadvertently discovers a heist – and it’s up to Blart to apprehend the criminals. Safety never takes a holiday and when duty calls, Blart answers.

This movie was as entertaining as I remember the first one. But with a deep father-daughter story. A fun family film with a father-daughter story that will have you leaving the theater thinking about connecting with your child.

Here's your invitation to the special event...RSVP if you can make it to NYC!

The Moms and National Fatherhood Intiative invite you to this special event:

The Office of Family Assistance at the U.S. Department of Human Services has asked us to share the following information with you. A new set of Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood performance measures have been proposed. Please review this post to learn more information on how to request the proposed measures as well as more information on how to comment on the proposal.

The FaMLE Cross-site project will answer three main research questions: (1) What strategies did grantees use to design well-conceived programs? (2) What strategies did grantees use to successfully implement well-conceived programs? (3) What were the reported outcomes for participants in the programs? In order to answer these questions, they are considering a new set of data collection activities.

Background > For decades various organizations and agencies have been developing and operating programs to strengthen families through healthy marriage and relationship education and responsible fatherhood programming. The Administration for Children and Families (ACF), Office of Family Assistance (OFA), has had administrative responsibility for federal funding of such programs since 2006 through the Healthy Marriage (HM) and Responsible Fatherhood (RF) Grant Programs.

The federal government currently collects a set of performance measures from HM and RF grantees. The purpose of this previously approved information collection is to allow OFA and ACF to carry out their responsibilities for program accountability.

Current request > ACF is engaged in a learning agenda to increase their understanding of Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood programs. This means that they incorporate multiple opportunities and options for learning throughout a program's implementation that provide a range of insights and perspectives. These opportunities help programming constantly develop and advance. For example, data provide the opportunity to feed information back to decision-makers and leaders—both those on the ground and those in management—to inform program design, operation, and oversight.

On November 6, 2014, ACF published a Federal Register Notice (79 FR 65973) requesting public comment on a proposed new set of performance measures to be collected by all grantees, beginning with the next round of HMRF grants. These measures will collect standardized information in the following areas:

Applicant characteristics;

Program operations (including program characteristics and service delivery); and

Participant outcomes (will be measured both at initiation of programservices (pre-test) and completion (post-test)).

To learn more and comment on the proposed peformance measures, please see the full article on the Federal Register detailing comment submission guidelines here.

Here’s the scoop: Back in January, NFI hosted a webinar titled "Responsible Fatherhood: What’s Mom got to Do with It?" (You can access the webinar recording here in case you missed it.) During that webinar, we surveyed participants on other topics of importance to their work, and learned of two highly requested webinars:

1) Funding fatherhood programs and other related work

2) Working with fathers in corrections and probation/parole

Armed with these requests, NFI went to bat to find experts to partner with us on these topics. We think you’ll agree that we hit a home run with two, valuable (and free!) learning opportunities coming soon in April.

National Fatherhood Initiative is proud to offer the following webinars to anyone interested in the federal funding process and working with fathers in corrections and probation/parole. The two don’t necessarily go together - but they can!

On Thursday April 16th from 2pm-3:30pm EST > NFI is proud to present a funding-related webinar hosted by two staff members of Saint Wall Street: the first being a former federal Branch Chief for discretionary grants and the second, a federal grant reviewer, long-experienced with the federal funding agency. The webinar is titled:

Saint Wall Street is a non-profit organization that helps organizations achieve the highest good and the highest return. Saint Wall Street inspires changed behavior within organizations and helps nonprofit board and executive directors become change leaders who understand, communicate, and leverage the market value of their program’s impacts. This is also commonly known as “program return on investment” or PROI.

Learning how to submit a proposal that qualifies is imperative, as the federal Grant Process is highly competitive, has a limited amount of money to be awarded, and receives more qualified applications then can be funded. As you may already know, it doesn’t matter how great your program performs, your proposal will be eliminated from eligibility immediately if it fails to meet submission guidelines. The webinar will cover the following:

An overview of the federal grant-making process from the key insider perspectives of a former federal Branch Chief for discretionary grants and a federal grant reviewer long-experienced with the funding agency

Share common mistakes to avoid as you prepare your application

Provide tips on interpreting the funding opportunity announcement, and insight to prove your program investment-worthy.

This webinar is a MUST for any fatherhood program interested in receiving federal grants – even those working in corrections and probation/parole. Click here to register.

On Thursday April 23rd from 2pm-3:30pm EST > NFI Vice President of Program Support Erik Vecere will be joined by Starlene Smith-Wright, Corrections Program Administrator for the Kentucky Department of Corrections to present a webinar titled:

The Kentucky Department of Corrections has long been focused on delivering sustainable fatherhood training to incarcerated fathers via NFI’s InsideOut Dad®, as well as partnering with community-based organizations, via the state’s Probation and Parole Division, to deliver NFI’s 24/7 Dad® programto fathers in transitional facilities and other community-based organizations in the re-entry field. Recently, Kentucky revealed exciting data they have collected around success in working with incarcerated fathers, particularly, a reduction in recidivism and improved behavior.

Kentucky’s data and other anecdotal accounts NFI has received over the years shows that lives are being changed in prison (and out) with father-specific programming and engagement. During this webinar, participants will learn the best approaches and resources for working with incarcerated fathers, including using evidence-based strategies like InsideOut Dad®. It will also cover engaging fathers for successful reentry and what works in Probation and Parole. It will also highlight:

Current national best practices—especially recent data from the KY DOC that shows fatherhood programming reduces recidivism and improves behavior

The data and rationale for reaching fathers pre and post-release

Guidance on specific father engagement strategies and tools.

Anyone working with incarcerated or previously incarcerated fathers will benefit from this learning opportunity. Click here to register.

We receive a lot of phone calls and emails from dads and moms who seek guidance on father involvement and related issues. The vast majority of these calls and emails are associated with the negative effects of father absence. But every once in a while, a dad or mom, and sometimes a child, shares an uplifting story about how a dad stepped up to the plate to be a great dad and the positive impact of that action. Those stories drive our staff to never stop ensuring that as many children as possible experience the love of an involved, responsible, committed father.

We also stay on the lookout for such uplifting stories that aren't directly shared with us because we know they can motivate individuals and organizations in their work to connect fathers and children. These stories are often shared by the organizations that use our resources, donors, and dads and moms across the country. (Click here for Stories of Impact shared by our organization partners.) Sometimes we find stories during the course of our work to provide the most useful information and resources.

While conducting some research recently, I learned about StoryCorps, a nonprofit with the following mission:

StoryCorps' mission is to provide people of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share and preserve the stories of our lives. We do this to remind one another of our shared humanity, to strengthen and build the connections between people, to teach the value of listening, and to weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that everyone’s story matters. At the same time, we are creating an invaluable archive for future generations.

In its more than 10 years of existence, StoryCorps has captured and archived more that 50,000 recordings on an incredible range of topics. Curious, I plugged "fathers" into their search function to see whether I could find stories to use in our work. The result produced a number of recordings that turned up a few gems, two in particular that I hope will uplift you as much as they did me.

The first recording is of a 9-year-old boy, Aidan Sykes, who interviewed his father, Albert, about being a dad. (Albert runs a nonprofit focused on mentoring children. He is not only in a great dad, he has stepped up to help children less fortunate than his own.) Click here to listen.

The second recording is of Wil Smith telling his now adult daughter, Olivia, what it was like to raise her as a single dad while in college. He recorded the conversation shortly after he was diagnosed with cancer. Sadly, he died just a few months ago. Click here to listen.

We want to share more stories like these. Please let us know if you have one.

Do you have an uplifting story to share?

Do you have a Story of Impact that resulted from the use of an NFI resource? If so, click here to learn more about how to share it with us.

I often feel inadequate at managing work and family. Sure, I get home at a decent hour each day. But, I have to start early to accomplish this. By evening, I'm tired or still have my mind on work. Then I read a story like this one. This guy sounds like he has managing work and family figured out. Forbes named him, "America’s Most Promising CEO Under 35." He started a company in his mid-20’s that raised $70 million in 2012. By 2014, he was known as "The Guy Who Turned Down $500 Million For His Startup." Now, with a $1 Billion valuation, Ryan Smith, CEO of Qualtrics, can teach us the one thing he does to be successful with work and family.

After about a decade of bootstrapping, Qualtrics made its way into a profitable company generating $50 million in revenue. In 2012, they had 200 employees and 3,800 customers. Qualtrics helps companies perform employee and customer surveys in the cloud. It was created by Ryan Smith's dad, Scott Smith, a professor of marketing at BYU's school of business. My guess is that Qualtrics is a company that resembles the brands you'll find on our social good page—a brand who cares about fathers and families.

At 33 years old, a company offered to buy Ryan Smith's startup Qualtrics for more than $500 million, he asked his wife to take a drive. Smith ended up turning down the $500 million offer to sell his company. In 2014, Smith had 6,000 customers and 550 employees, and the company is expanding nationally and internationally opening an office in Dublin, Sydney, Seattle, and Washington, D.C..

After he and his wife talked, they felt strongly that earning so much money at once could "negatively impact the way they were raising their children." Smith and his wife had learned to manage work and family life.

"As a founder, you're either the type that gets invigorated with every milestone, or you get less interested. For me the bigger we get, the more scrappier we get, the hungrier I get," Smith told Business Insider in 2014. "I have to keep telling myself to look around and enjoy this," he said. "We sat in a basement and bootstrapped for 10 years so we can do this, be here. Now we have bunch of money, a ton of customers, and we're dominating our market." Together, the Smiths decided to keep their 800-person company private. Qualtrics is currently worth over $1 billion.

With the help of a CEO coach, Smith relates work-life balance to a plane that can "go lopsided and constantly needs to be stabilized." On one wing is his family, on the other is his work. When he's traveling for business, the work side of the plane tilts. Then, when he gets back home to his family, he knows to keep his schedule open for home and family life, in order to tilt the wings of his plane back up.

Smith's CEO coach taught him a strategy for success to be done every week. Smith's coach asked him what jobs he was responsible for in life. Smith replied the following:

Husband

Father

Son

CEO

Boss

Sibling

Grandson

Friend

I'm guessing your list looks like Ryan's. His coach then asked what he could do for each job that week to make him feel successful. For instance, if Ryan dated his wife and bought flowers, that could make him feel like a decent husband. Teach his daughter to ride a bike? Boom, instant better dad for the week.

Ryan found he could combine tasks on his list to achieve everything more efficiently. He learned quickly, if he was really productive, every task on the list starting Sunday could be done by Tuesday. If he took his daughter to his parent's house and taught her to ride a bike, he could be both a good father and son. Bam.

Smith's weekly list started to look like this:

Husband > Take wife to dinner and buy flowers

Father >Teach daughter to ride a bike

Son > Visit parents. Combine tasks 2 & 3.

Through all of this, Smith has learned people usually plan for one part of life ("I'm going to sell my company by the time I turn 30.") Most times, people "either don't know which steps to take to achieve that goal, or they don't plan what to do after the goal has been achieved."

While we know it takes quantity to ultimately get quality time, I think Ryan's plan of breaking done work and family life goals into weekly tasks is brilliant. We need to work against waking up one day and realizing our dreams and/or priorities have slipped from our radar. This takes a strategic plan. The truth is, what doesn't get scheduled, doesn't get done. This is true in work and with family.

Business Insider points out that after Smith explained this success tactic in an interview with them on Friday evening, he left the conference. While others stayed out late at a local pub, Smith drove three hours to Dublin and booked an early flight home to Utah. When his children woke up on Sunday morning, they spent all day with their father. This story illustrates in real life exactly the type of intention and focus we should have as husbands, fathers, sons, and leaders. It's the kind of focus I want to live out. Thank you, Ryan Smith, not only for having a great first name, but sharing a great strategy for us to follow.

Question > What's one thing you do to help manage work and family? Share your answer in the comment section or on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn using #247Dad.

24/7 Dad To Go App allows dads to customize time-sensitive checklists. These checklists can include items related to involved, responsible, and committed fatherhood. You can be an intentional dad too.

So much has been written and said about the problems created by teen pregnancy, particularly the problems it creates for teen moms and their children. Teen moms are, for example, much less likely to graduate from high school, or get a high school diploma by age 22, than are teen girls who don't have children. This disparity leads to other long-term disparities between these two groups including fewer employment opportunities and lower earnings for teen moms. And most of them receive little or no child support. These disparities place a burden on society as 63 percent of these moms rely on some kind of public assistance. Teen pregnancy places the children of teen parents at increased risk for a host of poor outcomes too numerous to mention here.

But what about teen dads? What do we know about their interactions with the mothers of their children? Do their interactions make things better or worse for the moms and children? Here's what we know.

We know they're much less likely to be involved in the lives of their children than are adult fathers. One primary reason is, quite simply, that a teen dad is rarely married to the mother. A whopping 88 percent of these parents are not married. Nevertheless, 20 percent of teen moms live with their "romantic partner" (most likely the father, but not necessarily a teen) within a year of giving birth. Even if all of these romantic partners are the fathers and are also teens, that's still a very low number of them living with their children. And that's unfortunate, because teen fathers who live with their children at the birth of their children are more likely to still live with them when these fathers become adults.

Fortunately, there is good news about the involvement of teen dads not living with their children and the impact of their involvement.

Half of these dads visit with their children at least monthly with most of them spending time with their children frequently. Interestingly, this is about the same rate of visitation among older nonresident fathers.

Additional research finds a positive impact of teen fathers on teen mothers and their children when teen fathers are involved before and immediately after the birth of their children. These teen fathers have a protective effect by reducing the risk of depression of teen mothers and distress of infants.

So when we take all of these facts into consideration, the picture of teen fathers' involvement in their children's lives is mixed. While the ability of teen dads to be involved in their children's lives is more challenging because of their lack of physical proximity, most of them are involved at some level and, when they are, have a positive impact on their children and the mothers.

The question, then, for organizations and practitioners is: How can I increase teen fathers' involvement? There are several ways, and NFI's resources can help:

Provide fathering education to teen fathers. NFI's 24/7 Dad® program is an excellent choice as organizations around the country have used it successfully with teen dads.

Provide relationship education to teen fathers. NFI has partnered with The Dibble Institute to provide Love Notes, a program for teen dads (and couples).

Provide education to teen moms on the importance of father involvement and how they can facilitate that involvement. NFI's Mom as Gateway™ workshop and Understanding Dad™ program are excellent choices.

Do you work with teen dads? Do you use a comprehensive approach that involves working with teen dads and teen moms?

For years, 24/7 Dad® Program leaders (including you amazing coordinators, facilitators, father participants and the like) have asked for a T-shirt to reflect your commitment to the 24/7 Dad® program, and to being an involved, responsible, committed father - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That’s why we’re excited to announce a partnership with the clothing line fodada to offer a trendy, high-quality, 24/7 Dad® T-Shirt and to ask a very important question: What’s a #247Dad?

Here's the deal: You buy the T-shirt; fodada donates $5 back to NFI. Boom. That's awesome. But wait, there’s a lot more…

Why “24/7 Dad”?

Being a dad is a great thing when you know what being a dad is all about, and when you're equipped with the skills to be involved, responsible, and committed to your child. But not every dad knows these things, and that’s ok - we’re here to help.

NFI cares deeply about raising awareness, building knowledge, and increasing skills related to fatherhood. We’ve spent the last 20 years developing top-notch curriculum and resources just for fathers, with 24/7 Dad® being our flagship fatherhood program. We exist to help dads hone their fathering, parenting, and relationship skills 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

We’ve also trained thousands of fatherhood leaders who have helped thousands of fathers be 24/7 dads (as in, live it out every day). Decades of research show the important role fathers play in their children’s lives. We connect fathers to families through organizations across the country.

That said, the new T-shirt not only reflects the 24/7 Dad® brand, but also the deep meaning of being a #247dad. Not only will the 24/7 Dad® T-shirt allow you to show your commitment to fatherhood, but the clothing brand fodada will donate $5 from each purchase back to NFI to continue our mission of ensuring every child has a 24/7 Dad®. BAM. A match made in the T-shirt gods’ heaven.

“We are excited to partner with NFI, who has supported so many dads and families throughout the years,” said fodada founder Bobby Barzi. “We are happy to help NFI serve more dads, while making dads feel comfortable and look their best.”

Christopher A. Brown, President at NFI had this to say about the partnership with fodada:

"Given the severity of father absence in our nation, it's vital we partner with companies that understand the importance of social good. We're excited to partner with a company like fodada that not only understands dads and their importance, but also understands what it means to be a 24/7 Dad. Working with fodada will help our organization-partners more deeply connect the dads they serve to what it means to be a 24/7 Dad, and help dads across the country show just how proud they are to be an involved, responsible, committed dad around the clock."

All of you fine 24/7 Dad leaders > wear this unique t-shirt to show how proud you are to be a 24/7 Dad leader. Give it to dads who attend your program or as a graduation gift.

Dads, Moms, & Children > Wear this shirt to show your passion for fatherhood and inspire those around you to live as responsible fathers. Or, give as a gift to a dad you know.

So, now we’re left with, “What’s a 24/7 Dad?”

We’re glad you asked. Everything we know about being a great father is tied to one or more of the following 24/7 Dad qualities and skills. In the coming months, we’ll unpack the meaning of each of these traits in their very own Father Factor posts. But for now, let’s get started with a brief list to get you thinking:

1. The 24/7 Dad is Self-Aware > The 24/7 Dad is aware of himself as a man and aware of how important he is to his family.

2. The 24/7 Dad Cares For Self > The 24/7 Dad takes care of himself.

3. The 24/7 Dad Understands Fathering Skills > The 24/7 Dad knows his role in the family.

5. The 24/7 Dad Understands Relationship Skills > The 24/7 Dad builds and maintains healthy relationships with his children, wife/mother of his children, other family members, friends, and community.

Share pics of yourself or the dad in your life being a 24/7 Dad on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram using #247Dad for your chance to win this 24/7 Dad T-shirt for FREE. NFI president Christopher Brown shares a pic with his 24/7 Dad shirt to get you started - share #247Dad-worthy posts and you could win this epic shirt.

As dads and leaders, we know that creating a habit of saving is important for our families’ long-term security. And the list of things to save for is never-ending, from retirement to kids’ education to replacing the water heater that dies in the middle of the night. But when it comes to actually putting money away for them…well, sometimes life gets in the way. If we are going to be the best leaders we can with our families and with other fathers, we need to be good examples when it comes to saving.

However, the importance of having money saved for your families’ future cannot be overstated. So we’ve compiled some common mistakes people make when it comes to saving their money and ways to fix them to help you start achieving those savings goals.

Mistake #1: Not enrolling in your employer’s 401(k) plan.

Whether you're leading other dads or your family, it’s easy to think retirement is too far off in the future to worry about it now, or thinking that your money would be better off not locked up for retirement. But thinking like that can cost you lots of money (and your lifestyle) in the future. And when it’s so simple to save with your employer’s 401(k) plan, it’s a mistake to pass it up.

Instead: Take full advantage of it! The beauty of enrolling in your employer’s plan is that money can be automatically taken out of your paycheck and invested in your future. If your employer matches your contributions, it’s a good idea to consider contributing at least enough to take full advantage of their match—after all, it’s free money. Who can say no to that?

Mistake #2: Not paying yourself with each paycheck

A common practice is to save whatever is left over from each paycheck, but this can lead to over-spending and under-saving.

Instead: “Pay” yourself a designated amount each month to put in your savings account—if you can set up an automatic transfer, that’s even better. By “paying” yourself first you have a more realistic view of what you can actually spend that month and it’s not as tempting to skimp on the savings in favor of buying things you don’t need.

Mistake #3: Keeping your checking and savings accounts at the same bank

Sure, it seems pretty convenient to keep everything at one bank: easy to monitor, easy to set up, and (here’s the kicker) easy to transfer. When transferring money from your savings account to your checking account is as easy as the click of a button, it becomes much more tempting to spend that hard-saved money on non-emergencies.

Instead: Separate your accounts. If you keep your savings account in a different bank than your checking, the process of transferring funds from savings to checking becomes a tad more inconvenient—and that’s a good thing! That makes you really think about whether that money will be used for an emergency, whether it’s worth the transfer or not, and when the money should just stay put. As a bonus, if you separate your accounts, you can shop around to find the best interest rates for your savings account.

Mistake #4: Paying off your debts with your savings funds

While it’s great that you’re working to pay off debts, it shouldn’t be at the expense of your entire savings account. Depleting your savings in order to work off your debt puts you in a pretty vulnerable position. If your car breaks down or your roof leaks and you don’t have any savings, you may have to take on more debt and could be worse off than before.

Instead: Try to find other spots in your budget that money can come from—it may seem like a drag since the money is sitting right there in your account, but having an emergency savings account is important to ensure you and your family’s financial security. We recommend building up to have at least $1,000 in savings.

It seems like all these banks and financial institutions are always throwing offers your way that sound good but are littered with terms you just don’t understand. All that financial mumbo-jumbo can make your head spin and cause you to either accept an offer that’s not right for you or turn away from one that’s perfect.

Instead: If you’re not sure, just ask. It sounds simple but far too often people are paying way more than they should for something and they don’t even know it. If there’s a term you don’t fully understand, it’s worth a call or email to your bank, insurance agent, or other trusted financial source to ensure you know exactly what you’re getting and how much you’re paying.

When dad’s in prison, his child is more likely to go to prison. Eighty-nine percent—that’s almost 9 out of 10 of Kentucky’s inmates—are male. Most of these inmates are fathers. We know most inmates aren't serving life sentences. Meaning, the father in prison is returning to his community and to his family at some point. Sadly, most inmates are released ill equipped to face the problems that put them in prison. The Kentucky Department of Corrections (DOC) is addressing this problem through fatherhood programs, and it’s working.

The Kentucky DOC has used NFI’s fatherhood programs since 2012. We wrote about the progress of the DOC training 381 dads and counting. Now we’re excited to share some insightful statistics—beyond the progress in training dads—on how effective our programs are to inmates and the DOC both while inmates are in prison and upon release. We know our fatherhood programs work, but we get excited when others conduct their own research and learn how much impact our programs have.

InsideOut Dad® is Effective > Here’s the Data

Here are the exciting statistics, compiled by the Kentucky DOC, on the recidivism rate and rate of in-prison disciplinary actions (e.g. behavioral infractions) for 575 dads who participated in the program for the two year period 2012-2014. Of 575 fathers who completed in the program:

318 were released

52 of those 318, or 16 percent, returned to prison as a result of a new charge or a parole violation which is 57 percent lower than the two-year statewide recidivism rate of 37 percent

Moreover:

Prior to entering the program, participants averaged 1.836 disciplinary actions per inmate compared to only .32 actions per inmate while they participated in the program and .26 actions per inmate after they completed the program. This is a whopping 86 percent reduction in disciplinary actions.

Training Fathers While In Prison

According to feedback from a representative at the Kentucky DOC, the state has seen a clear shift in the inmate population from an egocentric attitude, to a focus on their families and children, even from inside prison. In addition to the fathers benefiting from the program, the DOC is meeting their goal of offering a cognitive, behavioral, and therapeutic approach to inmate rehabilitation (since they are using NFI’s InsideOut Dad® Program while a father is in prison and the 24/7 Dad® Program upon release from prison). Using both fatherhood training programs is helping the Kentucky DOC address their top four criminogenic concerns related to fathers:

Criminal and family history

Family (marriage and parenting) relatationships

Education and employment

Leisure and recreation

Training Fathers After Release

Research shows that fathers who learn to connect to their children and family before being released are more likely to successfully integrate back into the community and less likely to return to prison.

NFI has worked with the Kentucky DOC to create a reentry program to help dads continue building their fathering skills once released. Kentucky's DOC works with community-based organizations, via the state’s Probation and Parole Division, to deliver NFI’s 24/7 Dad® program to fathers in transitional facilities and other community-based organizations in the reentry field. 24/7 Dad® addresses fathering from a holistic perspective and continues to build on pro-fathering behaviors. (For a report on the effectiveness of 24/7 Dad® in a reentry setting, click here.)

While the statistics on recidivism and disciplinary actions are vital to understanding the widespread impact NFI’s programs can have on inmates and corrections systems, behind every statistic, as they say, is a person. To truly grasp the life-changing impact of NFI’s programs, it’s important to capture that impact in the words of the dads who participate in them. Here is one Kentucky inmate’s story. Please take a moment to reflect on his words. See what happens when a father goes to prison and is then shown the tools for how to connect with his child through NFI’s programs.

How Training Changed One Father > Read His Story

Dear NFI

I've always heard the old adage a carpenter is only as good as his tools. That's why I would like to thank you and your volunteers for giving me the opportunity to have experienced and to have graduated your IoD class (InsideOut Dad® Program). With so many dynamics I have facing me in having six children I have a large task ahead of me, but I have some of those tools I need to start building and mending those relationships I so long to have with my children and vice versa.

First of all I will tell you a little about myself, because change has to start with me. I am 45 years old and have six children ranging from 27 to 8 years of age. In 11 days I will serve out a 15-year sentence, but it is not the first time I have been incarcerated. Altogether, it will make 22 years I have served in sentences in the state of Kentucky which lets you know I haven't been in my children's lives very much over the years.

Through God and this class I have actually started mending some of these relationships I have either destroyed or never gave a chance to develop in the first place. Since 1988 I've been in and out of jails and prisons only to stay out long enough to start a relationship and ultimately having children and then to leave them behind again. This time I served out my 15-year sentence and then seven years and four months with educational and other good time. I know I've done everything this time to turn my life around, but in order to do so I had to finally face my demons and look at myself for who I really was. If we don't know it's broke we tend not to fix the problem.

All in all I've left a lot of damaged lives behind in my wake of destruction. With IoD (InsideOut Dad® Program) I've been able to salvage some of these relationships and prepare to face the challenges of starting a relationship with my children.

The first tool I’ve learned to use is communication. I have six children by four different mothers which I'm not proud of, but ultimately it seems I had fallen into my father's footsteps (learned behavior), so in the seven years there's been no telephone calls because of the high cost to make telephone calls from prison. I wish I could start a fund just to help with that cost of future fathers could stay in touch with your children, especially the ones going through this program.

Through writing I had mended my relationship with my oldest daughter Sheena. We have been corresponding on a regular basis for a while now. She followed my footsteps and committed a crime two years ago, but was put on a diversion program, which included six months of in-house rehabilitation.

During our time of writing I've used several tools I've learned through IoD (InsideOut Dad® Program) such as getting to know who she is, her personality traits, so I would be able to have more to talk to her about. Of course I have apologized many times over the years that I was absent from her life.

I knew she blamed me for the way her life had turned out so I used another tool (empathy). I put myself in her shoes and realized this was true because I too blame my parents as well for my life being messed up. Now we have something in common that we can share and build on. I let her know I can relate to her, because I had been on my own all of my life as well. I told her how I finally located my mother at the age of 15 years old and how it didn't go over so well. Ultimately I moved in with her and my step-father to pay $55 a week for my part-time job that I had that summer just to sleep on the couch. I moved out on my own after two months and it actually was cheaper for me that way. I also told her I had to stop blaming them, because as an adult I knew wrong from right now. I couldn't blame them for my mistakes any longer. Like her, my rough childhood resulted in drug use to numb the pain from the past.

Now here's the miracle I want to share with the world. This is better than the fact I get to leave prison here in 11 days. After the fact she did six months rehab she decided she wasn't ready to leave so she signed up for another six months which I supported 100%. I told her that she needed to take this time to be there for herself and not worry about anyone else because she does have four children of her own which her mother has now. I told her I have learned by experience if you can't be there for yourself you can't be there for anyone else either. If you don't love yourself how can you expect anyone else to love you in return? This one time it was all right to be selfish, because it was for all the right reasons.

This girl completed 14 months of rehab dad being your number one supporter and biggest fan. A recovery center in Kentucky has hired her on full-time as part of the staff now. She is in a good place now and loves her job. A month ago she sent me her phone number. The fact that I'm leaving here on the 31st gave me an opportunity to get an institutional phone call to see if she would be at the bus station when I'm dropped off that morning. By the way I will be spending the morning with her and my four grandchildren whom I've only met the oldest as of yet. This is the first conversation I've had with my daughter in over seven years.

She answered and said hello and I said hi baby girl. She said who is this and I said it's your daddy. All she could do is cry. After she got her composure she finally said the words so longed to hear. I love you and I forgive you for not being there for all those years. She said through God she had so much peace that she was finally able to forgive me. In our conversations through writing God had been our main subject of discussion. The way I see it, whether you believe in Jesus or not, which I do, there are good morals to be learned from the Bible. Just as the tools I've gained from IoD. With these tools and the wisdom and patience of my instructor Mr. X, I've built relations with two of my children.

Nikki my 21-year-old daughter is who I am moving in with on the 31st. She just had her first baby on the 18th of this month. She truly loved and forgives me as well. My 25-year-old daughter and whom I've only seen four times while incarcerated since her birth has expressed a need to know me as well, because she has talked to her siblings and has noticed a change in my life and relationships I've built with them. IoD (InsideOut Dad®) is contagious.

My 19-year-old son doesn't respond, but I still send him letters, just to let him know I still love you. He may be a little angry, but in time even water dissolves the biggest and hardest of rocks.

My children 10 and eight years of age don't know me, but they soon will. I have written them over the years so they do know I exist and that I put forth the effort. All in all I would like to think NFI for IoD (InsideOut Dad®) for the programs put forth to help us fathers and children. Like I told my oldest daughter Sheena it's up to us now to stop this vicious cycle that's been handed down to us from generation to generation. It's time to plant new seeds.

Thank you for giving me the tools to do so. I don't know by putting my children needs before mine and getting to know them and giving them the chance to know me that we can turn things around. I believe now that I can turn things around. I believe now I can lead by example, to teach my children that they can live a morally ethic life by watching me to do it in love. I have for myself and them as well now. If I can't fix myself how can I even possibly think of fixing my relationship with them? Thank you for your time in the tools I needed to rebuild the relationships I so desire to have with my children. Your work and efforts have not been done in vain.

Sincerely,

B

This is only one inmates’ story. There are hundreds just like it in Kentucky alone. We at NFI are thankful for the leaders at the Kentucky DOC. We are so excited about their commitment to rehabilitating inmates through programs like InsideOut Dad® and 24/7 Dad® so that corrections is part of the solution rather than just another step in the criminal justice process. The state, the fathers, the families, and the children of Kentucky are seeing the benefits of this solution-based approach.

For more information on the products and services the Kentucky DOC is using along with the organizations they are partnering with, view the full case study and visit our Corrections Programs page for more program successes.

It's been over a year, but I can still sense the silent, awkward pause on the other end of the phone. When I talked with Emil, he spoke excitedly about his work with fathers in Torrington, CT. When I asked him "the why" behind his work with fathers, his tone changed from excited to convicted. In 40 minutes of conversation, Ilearned what's happening with dads in Torrington while being reminded of the conviction it takes to lead.

In 2000, there were 676,467 married households—52 percent of the state population in Connecticut. By 2010, that number had dipped to 672,013—49 percent. That's even considering the overall population of the state having grown from 3.41 million to 3.57 million. We have talked about Connecticut and fatherhood in the past, but another story is worth sharing.

Family Strides is an organization located in northwest Connecticut, who helps families and communities to ensure healthy pregnancy outcomes and positive parenting practices in order to strengthen families and reduce the incidence of child abuse and neglect. Family Strides has seen the above pattern of marriage and fatherhood take place in its community. In fact, the only place in the entire county that was serving fathers was the child support system, and the only place to send fathers who were not paying child support was prison. That is, before Family Strides came along.

Thirty-five minutes from Hartford is Torrington. For this county, there's a different option, besides jail, for dads who need help. A man named Emil is helping dads see that the role they play in their children’s lives is much more than just paying child support. Through our 24/7 Dad® Program, we have helped Family Strides teach dads to be better fathers.

Where does Family Strides find dads to help?

Whereas some organizations may find it difficult to recruit dads to attend a fatherhood program, Family Strides doesn't recruit. How do they get dads to attend? "Every father thinks he knows what he’s doing," says Emil, "There's so many programs for mom. But dad has nothing." He continues, "We ended up going into court system in the county, into the child-support court systems. They had no place to send dad but prison, or anger management."

The county magistrates, before Emil and his group came along offering something different, had nothing but prison for dads who didn't pay child support. "If the dad doesn't pay child support, you warn him...you warn him..you warn him...then you lock him up.", Emil explains. Emil has been in that court system for 10 years. Now, he doesn’t spend time recruiting dads. He works only from referrals like: family courts, hospitals, employment agencies, head starts, and other community-based organizations.

“I’ve worked with over a thousand dads, ” says Emil. The biggest issue? "Many men feel their job is to put roof over head and feed them (kids)—and that's where it ends. Nothing more..." says Emil. Emil asks dads he meets, "When was the last time you went to a parent-teacher conference?" Emil explains, "Most dad's will answer: isn’t that her (mom's) job?" Emil will also ask, "Who's your child's first teacher?" He recalls from years of experience, dads will always give the name of their child's teacher at school. Emil will then say, "No, dad, you are...you are the teacher.”

What happens in the fatherhood program?

Must dads think they are the only ones to ever make a mistake. But something magical happens when I dad gets with other dads in a group. He starts to realize, "Yeah, I screwed up, but so did he." For maybe the first time ever, this dad learns that we all make mistakes. Emil explains, "You can make a 30-minute mistake. But, you can’t make a 30-minute mistake daily." At some point, we have to find a reason to live better stories. For some, the child is that reason.

Emil explains:

There is nothing more valuable than your child. Nothing. Not the size of your house, how much money you make, what kind of car you drive, or what kind of vacation you take. Every decision you make has to place your child first.

Dads who attend Emil's group learn everything related to fatherhood, from relationships and communication, to discipline. Emil points out, when all a dad knows to "teach" a child is yelling—dads must learn that they have other options. For a topic as seemingly simple as discipline, understand you're only gonna do, as a dad, what you were taught and what was done to you.

Sadly, most dads Emil sees don't want to be like their own dad. But, as Emil explains, "they are 50 percent their dad and 50 percent of mom." You are the sum of your experiences and education. How you were parented is often how you parent. This is all fine and good unless you had less-than-perfect parent models. Emil explains, "Alcoholism is a big issue. Drug abuse is an issue. Economy and jobs is an issue." He often asks to meet the dads' kids. Experience shows, "I can’t help everyone..but, when the father starts seeing how much he can help his kid, he can change..." says Emil.

Emil often meets the children of the dads he works with, "I ask them, 'what do you think of this guy?'...when they say, 'He’s my daddy. I love my daddy. He’s my world...' These fathers break down. They haven’t heard that before. A light-bulb goes off.." recalls Emil. It's a 13-week fatherhood course. Emil says, "I don’t throw guys out of the class after 13 weeks. They are all welcome to keep coming. They come back occasionally. I have gentlemen that come back for the last six years at least monthly."

The Why Behind the What

Emil started helping dads in Torrington 10 years ago. At the time, he had a 12-year-old daughter and an infant soon. Emil had a strong relationship with his Dad, recalling over the phone how his dad used to tell him, “I love you so much it hurts.” Emil recalls the first person he called upon having his son was his father, simply to say, “Now I understand what you mean.”

Emil's son, Emil Jr, was born with an intestinal problem. At three days old he was transferred to a special teaching hospital in Connecticut. It was 10 days later, Emil's son was diagnosed as having Down Syndrome. His son got some better as time went on, but they lived in children's medical center. After a few years, Emil lost his son to leukemia. “As a dad, there is nothing worse than being helpless.” I listened as Emil recalled those helpless times of walking the hallways of the hospital. I listened to Emil's voice shake as he shared with me.

Emil explained, with conviction, why he cares so much about fathers. He says, "I still use my son in teaching the group." When a dad says “I stay away because 'she' (the mother) won’t let me...” Emil will reply, “I’d love to trade with you. You are choosing not to see them. I can’t choose...You can get on a phone and call at least. You can make your visits. I can't see my son anymore. I go to a stone."

How does Emil know his work with fathers matters?

At his son’s wake, over 200 dads attended. As we closed our conversation, Emil has a message he wanted all dads to understand about having kids:

They need you all their life…be there. You need to be the man you want to see your daughter with. You don’t want to see your son brutalize girls. So you don't need to brutalize the child's mom. Be there for your child. Nothing is more important.

As the nation’s #1 provider of fatherhood skill-building programs and resources, NFI provides guidance for practitioners and organizations on how they might be able to use to use the latest research on human behavior to enhance the effectiveness of their work with fathers. NFI provides this guidance in a series of blog posts called Research to Application: Guidance for Practitioners and Programs. The series is also available in the form of quick reference guides that you can download by clicking on the button at the end of the posts.

The series offers a platform for generating dialogue among NFI, organizations, and practitioners on ways that research can be applied to addressing pain points in serving fathers. This post is the second one in the series. (To access the first post, click here. To access the second post, click here. To access the third post, click here.) It provides ideas on how you might integrate research on positive deviance into your work with fathers. Integrating this research can help you identify model fathers who have overcome great odds to become involved, responsible, committed fathers, models you can share with other fathers who struggle to do the same.

If you implement any of the ideas in this post, or develop and implement your own ideas, please share them with us at info@fatherhood.org. We’ll use your experiences to update this guide so it is even more useful.

The Research In the Power of Positive Deviance (1), Richard Pacale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin chronicle the research and share many diverse examples of how professionals have used positive deviance to create positive behavior change in populations across the globe. Don’t be thrown by the negative connotation that the word “deviance” might have for you. As the authors point out, positive deviance refers to “outliers who succeed against all odds.” Furthermore,

Positive deviance (PD) is founded on the premise that at least one person in a community, working with the same resources as everyone else, has already licked the problem that confounds others. The individual is an outlier in the statistical sense—an exception, someone whose outcome deviates in a positive way (emphasis added) from the norm.

They share examples of how professionals have created programs to address such wide-ranging subjects as improving child nutrition (Vietnam), reducing female circumcision (Egypt), reducing hospital infections (United States), and reintegrating abducted girls—turned into soldiers after abduction—back into the community (Uganda).

What links all of these examples, and is a hallmark of using positive deviance, was the use of ethnographic research methods, primarily observation, to identify outliers who engage in positive behavior (i.e. the innovation in the community) to produce the outcomes the professionals sought (e.g. children who were well nourished and girls who weren’t circumcised), and then to understand the steps (process) that the outliers followed to produce the outcomes. The professionals used what they learned to design programs that had community involvement—indeed that were primarily community run—that spread knowledge and skill development related to the behaviors that led to the positive outcomes.

Another example in the book, which is relevant to working with fathers, involved the use of positive deviance by the international non-profit Save the Children to reduce infant mortality among the Pashtun-speaking people who live in the remote mountains of northwest Pakistan. The following description uses excerpts from the book. (Pardon the length of this example. The length provides the breadth necessary to grasp the power of using positive deviance.)

The Pashtun-speaking people in the remote mountains of North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan, endure one of the world’s highest infant mortality rates. One of every twenty newborns dies within the first year of life. A fiercely independent people, their communities have a long history of rebuffing the efforts of health authorities to address this problem. Recognizing these inhibiting features as conditions in which positive deviance often flourishes, Save the Children resolved to give the process a try.

So how does one coax a community into tackling a problem it has never acknowledged as such? Most were aware that infant mortality was among the highest in all of Pakistan (85 deaths in every 1,000 births). Yet leaders and villagers were inured to all this as “Allah’s will.”

It was agreed that a good initial step would be to create reliable maps of recent village experience with newborn survival. That very evening, the first of what was to become a number of such efforts took shape with improvised materials representing houses, streets, mosque, and market-place. Hunkered on the ground, using colored felt-tipped pens to code stones into categories (e.g. families with no children, families that had lost a newborn since the previous Ramadan, etc.) the men created an epidemiological map. A green dot on a village home denoted a newborn who had survived. Black denoted less fortunate households. Orange, yellow, brown, and purple indicated cause of death—umbilical chord infection, asphyxia, diarrhea, hypothermia, or extremely low birth weight. Participants became wholly engrossed. Why had some newborns, born under exactly the same conditions as those who died, survived and flourished? These conversations would ultimately pierce the shroud of “Allah’s will."

As the men were compiling census data, a parallel endeavor unfolded among the women. In their case, beans were the artifact of choice for the mapping process. Analogous to the Eskimos’ proverbial twenty-three words for “snow,” Pashtun women traffic in the currency of beans, a staple of everyday diet. Differences between beans are subtle to the untrained eye but as distinct as words in a dictionary for the literate. The women’s maps had deeper texture. They understood precisely what went on in the first two to three weeks after each child was born. Considerable care was devoted to creating these epidemiological maps. They captured who was born, who died; babies that had diarrhea, were underweight, or experienced respiratory difficulties or umbilical cord infections but survived. The end result was a composite picture of the men’s and women’s efforts.

Unsurprisingly, the ensuing process was not conducted as “interviews” but informed through stories. Pashtun life is captured in oral tradition. While there are no written diaries or civic records, memories provide an astonishing wealth of detail. When a baby is born, neighboring women visit, discuss, observe, and commit to memory what happened and how. To accommodate this tradition, tactile objects such as homemade stuffed dolls were employed to capture what people do, not what they know. This impelled the classic shift from the “what” to the “how.” Enactment confirmed that many households delivered the baby in an animal shed because delivery was regarded as messy. Some sessions evoked stoic accounts of tragedy as mothers-in-laws, new mothers, and traditional birth attendants (dais) elaborated on infants that had turned blue and died a few hours after a winter delivery. Reenactment with rag dolls and crude material substituting for umbilical cord and placenta revealed how the dais attention switches from the newborn to the mother as soon as the baby is born. Miriam, one of the oldest and most respected dais in the village, enacted the common practice of placing the naked newborn on the mud floor so those present could blow prayers over it. In the cold Haripur winter (with no source of heat and insulating blanket between baby and damp earth), hypothermia was the unintended result.

Once common practices had been captured, it was time for the PD inquiry itself—the search of PD’s. Earlier mapping helped the group identify families who had “at risk” newborns who had survived against all odds. Small groups of male volunteers joined Shafique and his team to visit and chat with the male members of these families to find out what they had done. A similar process took place among the women. Pashtun tradition is exquisitely sensitive to not awarding social recognition to one person at the expense of others. It was understood that “heroes” would not be singled out—rather, discoveries would highlight successful practices, not individuals.

One mother-in-law mentioned using a gadeya (pillow). “Why?” the visitors asked. “Before the baby arrives,” she answered, “I make a special pillow of rages to put on the floor and to cover the baby when it is born.” “Show us,” the visitors requested. She did. A member of the visiting team, a mother-in-law herself, interjected: “I do something similar. I immediately put the baby to the mother’s breast and put a blanket on it.”

The men’s visits with male relatives shed light on the PD practice of using a clean razor blade to cut the umbilical chord. One PD husband had created a “clean delivery kit.” Another took his wife to the clinic for a prenatal exam. The list of practical and successful expedients gradually expanded.

In parallel conversations, men and women discussed their findings. At times this triggered heated debate. Vetting ensured the most relevant strategies and practices would gain ascendance. Convergence wasn’t always easy.

It was time to share discoveries with the larger community. Separate male and female community meetings were carefully choreographed to share the findings from the home visits. Eager villagers came together to hear about some of the secrets that could save newborn lives. The design of this phase gave testimony to the villagers’ latent creativity, confirming yet again that a community knows best how to engage its own.

Dissemination workshops tended to follow a trajectory. They led off with an introduction of technical PD practices (e.g. clean razor blades) but turned inevitably to the importance of the husband’s involvement and support of his wife. One violated a cultural taboo by giving his pregnant wife special food (trespassing on the mother-in-law’s authority). Then questions began: “What do you think of this?” “How about a husband taking his wife to the prenatal clinic?” “Where do you draw the line?”

At the conclusion of the community meetings, volunteers gathered to develop a strategy to enable the whole community to practice the successful but sometimes controversial strategies that had resulted in newborn survival. It was decided that the men should gather once a month at the tea shop in their mohallahs (neighborhood meetings), recount stories of recent newborns, discuss what they should do, learn more about pregnancy and delivery, and perhaps practice some new behaviors. Women developed a similar plan for monthly mohallah sessions where more elaborate new behaviors were practiced as well as stories of deliveries where the new behaviors were adopted.

The point, of course, was to reinforce the focus on the effect of PD practices and to highlight the importance of the participation of both mothers and fathers in the survival and well-being of their children.

The point, of course, is not that this example has direct application to increasing father involvement in this country. It shows, however, that even in a culture in which fathers were involved only at the margins in an aspect of child well-being that the use of positive deviance can overcome extremely challenging barriers to greater father involvement.

Ideas on Application The PD approach the authors outline involves much more than simply finding outliers. It involves getting a community to own a problem and then mobilizing the community to solve the problem. Nevertheless, you can use the “finding outliers” portion of this approach to identify models of fathers who have overcome great odds to become an involved, responsible, committed father that you can share with other fathers. You might also be able to involve fathers in developing an approach that will help other fathers to overcome great odds. Involving model fathers to influence other fathers will increase buy-in from other fathers because the solutions come from and are delivered by fathers like them. Here are some ideas to consider.

If you work with a father (one-on-one or in a group setting) who is involved, responsible, and committed in the lives of his children, ask him how he became a good father. Ask him questions, such as:

How did you become involved in the lives of your children?

What barriers did you face in becoming involved?

What steps did you take to overcome that (those) barrier(s)? (Or) How did you solve the problem(s) that (those) barrier(s) presented?

What advice would you give to a father who faces the same barrier(s)?

Keep an open mind to how the father overcame the odds. Resist judging his solutions. Pay particular attention to uncommon or unusual solutions the father developed. If after he shares his experience you think he provides a good model for you to share with other fathers, ask him whether he’d be willing to share his story. He could share through you via a case study you could write on his story. If he is part of a group of fathers you work with, ask him to share during a group meeting/session.

If you don’t work with such a father, commit now to finding such a father so you can eventually apply the idea above.

If you’re fortunate enough to work with several fathers who have overcome great odds, ask them whether they will volunteer to develop an approach to sharing their experience with other fathers, and whether they will share their experience. (Some or all of these model fathers will act as spokespersons, so they must be reliable and credible. Be careful in your choice of them.) If they are willing, gather them (e.g. in a focus group) and ask them the kinds of questions identified above. Then have them design an approach that focuses on strategies and tactics (i.e. specific behaviors rather than simply sharing knowledge) for overcoming barriers that will help other fathers become involved in their children’s lives. Focus them on the “how to” of transferring these behaviors to other fathers. Consider asking the fathers to not only develop an approach for transferring behaviors to fathers served by your organization, but to include ways to transfer those behaviors to fathers they can access in other parts of the community. You will probably have to hold several meetings to use this approach.

Regardless of how you apply positive deviance, approach your effort as an experiment. Keep track of what works with fathers in general and with specific kinds of fathers (e.g. custodial and non-custodial) so that you can apply what works in future work with fathers one-on-one or in groups, and avoid what doesn’t work. And last but not least, share your results with NFI at info@fatherhood.org so that we can improve future versions of this guide.

Resources As you apply positive deviance to identify models of fathers who have overcome great odds to become an involved, responsible, committed father, consider reading The Power of Positive Deviance. We also recommend the book Switch, which discusses a similar idea the authors call following the “Bright Spots” (i.e. find what’s working and “clone it.”). This similar idea is part of a larger framework (the Switch Framework) that you might find useful in your work.

Get the full PDF version of this study today!

Don’t forget to look for more posts and reference guides with post 1, post 2, and post 3 in this series!

Poverty. Behavioral issues. Drug abuse. Becoming pregnant as a teen. Prison. Local leaders have come together to form the Richmond County Fatherhood Initiative, which hopes to reach fathers of all backgrounds throughout the Northern Neck of Virginia. Their goal? Make sure fathers are there for their children, their families, their community.

If you've seen our post on The Father Absence Crisis in America, then you know the issues that can arise when a child grows up in a home without a father. For Richmond County, these statistics are likely realities. In a news story on the Richmond County Fatherhood Initiative, we read how dads are learning to connect with family—and how this is helping the community.

We often talk about the national epidemic of father absence. However, the realities can and should be broken down into state by state (community by community) levels. If you read our post on what's happening in Richmond prisons titled When Dad's in Jail, you will no doubt understand the stats related to father absence are realities that we must work to make more and better fathers.

Philip Belfield, the Branch Executive of the Richmond County YMCA, has said of the father absence problem:

“When I saw the statistics of the results, what happens to kids and families that don’t have fathers that participate, it’s really staggering...And to see that is happening right here in our area in the Northern Neck, where more and more fathers are not participating in their families’ lives, I feel like that’s something that 1) personally, but 2) [with] my role with the YMCA, we can play a positive role in that area.”

The Richmond County Fatherhood Initiative grew out of a forum conducted by Claudette Henderson, the former Director of Richmond County Social Services. The forum centered on the need for a fatherhood presence in the local area.

“When I heard about this program, I had to join,” said Davis Roberts, principal of Richmond County Elementary.

“If dads are present, you reduce dropouts; with dads being present, kids are less likely to be in poverty; with dads being present, [it results in] better self-esteem for the kids.” —Davis Roberts (Principal, Richmond County Elementary)

Coming together to kickstart the program were local community leaders including

Another helping hand came from Virginia Delegate Margaret Ransone (R-99th) who, according to Davis, played a key role in gathering advertisement for the community support group.

“As a woman and a mom, it was eye opening for me to recognize the impact fathers have on their children,” Ransone said. “It’s easy to get on a routine and forget what our Dads really mean to a family.” —Virginia Delegate Margaret Ransone (R-99th)

The Rest of the Fatherhood Story in Greater RichmondNFI has been working to help fathers and families in Virginia for years. For instance, First Things First of Greater Richmond received a capacity-building grant from NFI in 2007 to start building the foundation it needed to create a sustainable fatherhood program. With the foundation in place, they began adding the elements that would make up an effective fatherhood initiative across the city and surrounding counties like you're starting to see today.

First, they began using NFI curricula to meet the community’s needs. They partnered with AmeriCorps and Richmond City Human Services for a grant to hire two part-time staff to deliver NFI’s InsideOut Dad® Program in the Richmond City Jail. They also partnered with the Henrico County Public Schools Fatherhood Initiative - Man Up, which was not using a curriculum, to begin offering NFI’s 24/7 Dad® program.

All of this work helped raise public awareness in the community about the importance of serving fathers. For example, NFI’s Fatherhood Resource Kiosks, filled with brochures for dads, were a public, visible sign that services were being provided to dads. First Things First also worked with the Richmond Family and Fatherhood Initiative to help them diversify their resources and provide instructors to deliver various programs.

Want to see First Things First in action in Richmond City Jail? Watch testimonials from participants in (Richmond, VA): In this video, see how InsideOut Dad® is helping teach men to be better husbands and dads and connect to their families.

First Things First has also promoted their story well—using publicity to ensure that the community knows the positive work they are doing, such as working with the jail to promote the use of InsideOut Dad®, which resulted in a story in the Richmond Times Dispatch. Additionally, they are using various resources at their disposal to educate and inspire their partners and their community about the importance of providing services to fathers. Here are just a few services provided by other groups or companies First Things First partners with various organizations and entities to carry out its work:

Richmond City Sheriff’s Office

Henrico County Public Schools Fatherhood Initiative – Man Up

U Turn Ministries

Central Library

We are proud to be helping the Greater Richmond area reach fathers and are excited about what we've seen can happen when a group of leaders see the problem and work toward a solution. Go Richmond, and go dads.

Have you ever struggled to convince a mother to allow the father of her child to be more involved in the child's life? Maternal gatekeeping is one of the primary challenges practitioners face when encouraging moms to allow dads into their children's lives. Maternal gatekeeping refers to a mom’s protective beliefs about the desirability of a dad's involvement in their child’s life, and the behaviors acted upon that either facilitate or hinder effective co-parenting. Maternal gatekeeping occurs regardless of whether parents are married, divorced or unmarried, and regardless of the parents’ satisfaction with the relationship between them. But, clearly, it presents the greatest challenge when the relationship between the parents is poor.

350 Practitioners Speak Out

NFI surveyed more than 350 practitioners who attended NFI's free What's Mom Got to Do With It webinar on December 9th, 2014, and asked them the following question related to maternal gatekeeping: What are the most important problems the moms you work with have with involving dads in their children's lives? (To access a recorded version of the webinar, click here.) The most important problems (in descending order of importance) are:

History of domestic violence or other abuse

Poor past or current experiences with/perceptions of the dad

Mom doesn't like dad or is angry with him

Mom doesn't see dad as important in the life of her child

Dad isn't a good parent

Mom doesn't want to give up control over the life of her child (i.e. if dad becomes involved, she perceives she'll lose control)

Mom has no contact/relationship with the dad

The research on maternal gatekeeping supports these practitioners' experiences. The motivations for maternal gatekeeping vary widely. They depend on individual, couple, and familial circumstances and situations. Mothers might have a difficult time relinquishing familial responsibility, might want to validate their identity as “the mother” and garner recognition for their “maternal” or “feminine” contributions to the family, or might view the father as incompetent or even dangerous to the child. This latter view might be based either on actual evidence, the father’s past behaviors, or her personal perceptions of him and his failures in the male familial role.

Helping Practitioners

One of our primary jobs at NFI is to help practitioners to more effectively do their jobs. Accordingly, we asked those same 350 practitioners the following question related to how to help moms involve fathers: What are the two most important topics moms need help with around involving dads? The biggest topics (also in descending order of importance) are:

Why dad is important to their child's life

Communication

Co-Parenting

Importance of putting the well-being of the child first

How to trust dad

Mutual respect (i.e. important of mom respecting dad and vice versa)

How to keep the dad engaged

Conflict resolution

The good news is NFI already has a number of low-, medium-, and high-intensity resources that address these and other challenges presented by maternal gatekeeping (e.g. the impact of the mother's history with men and her own father). These resources include the Understanding Dad™ program, Mom as Gateway™ workshop, downloadable eguides, pocketbooks, and tip cards for moms. And we've already started to identify additional resources to develop that will help practitioners address the other issues because, well, that's our job and commitment to practitioners: Supporting You. Supporting Fathers. Supporting Families.™ Stay tuned.

I receive many phone calls and emails from people looking to either partner, provide a service, solve a problem, or address a father-related crisis. These people can range from state-level administrators, to social service agency directors, to program facilitators, to a struggling father. The challenge that I face on any given day is the same that we all face: how do I prioritize the requests and opportunities and make decisions that will most effectively accomplish the mission of my organization?

Fortunately, National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) has developed a very specific nonprofit business model that drives our decisions on a daily basis. I can review our nonprofit business model canvas (here's one example of a business model canvas) throughout my day to gauge how well the opportunities and tasks line up with our customer/partner value propositions, customer/partner segment focus, key resources, key activities, key channels, and revenue streams.

This canvas is a strategic management and entrepreneurial tool. It allows you to describe, design, challenge, invent, and pivot your business model. But as nonprofit leaders, we have an added complexity. Grant Smith, of Innovative Nonprofit, describes it this way:

Regular for-profit business has one main type of customer or client, one that receives products or services in exchange for payment. The business then uses the revenue to pay for administrative expenses, marketing, salaries, etc., and everything else production related. In a regular for-profit business, the person who pays is also the person who receives the product or service. But, in a nonprofit the traditional client is split into two: the donor client and the beneficiary client. One pays and the other receives the product or service. This division creates a business logistics problem. You now have two people for every one that a regular business has.

In a regular business, the client or customer has one reason for dealing with you, to satisfy their wants and needs. However with a nonprofit, that client is now split in two, each desiring to have their individual wants and needs be satisfied. To achieve that, a nonprofit needs to incur differently oriented costs, perform different activities, market to each differently and measure the success of each relationship differently. In essence, nonprofits need two different, yet complementary, business models.

When you look at it that way, it is easy to see why we struggle to implement and sustain effective fatherhood programs. On the one hand, we have to translate the importance of responsible fatherhood into clear examples of how it will address the focal areas of the funders, while on the other manage the delivery of services in a way that meets the fathers’ critical issues.

This dynamic also highlights how important a nonprofit business model canvas is to the life of your organization. A canvas provides a clear and objective benchmark to quickly test whether you and other staff are putting the right amount of time, energy, and resources in the right partnerships and activities. You can learn more details about the process and some great examples of how to create a Nonprofit Business Model Canvas here.

Once your canvas is set, you can then focus on the integration of it into your own daily tasks and those of your direct reports. This tool can help you and other staff avoid getting caught up in the wave of demands and activities that may seem important at first glance, but upon further examination don’t tie in directly to your organization’s goals and priorities.

In our line of work, we usually err on the side of saying “yes” to every opportunity that comes our way. However, the most important and powerful word we can learn to use is “no.” Your canvas will help you know when to use it.